Policeman says inquiry should spur church to change

The senior policeman who blew the whistle on an alleged police cover-up of church sex abuse in New South Wales has called on the Catholic Church to make radical changes to fix problems plaguing the church.

Pressure had been building on the Government to react to growing social and political outrage at the latest series of revelations of paedophilia in society.

Most are centred on the Catholic Church, but Ms Gillard says that it is not the only focus of the inquiry, which will look into claims across the breadth of society.

Chief Inspector Fox says aspects of the Catholic Church, such as confession, must come under scrutiny.

"We need to focus on things such as: should priests that are telling other priests in confessionals be allowed to keep the fact that they're abusing children (secret)?" he said.

"We need to get laws to stop that happening and to compel those priests that are hearing those confessions to say, 'Listen, God doesn't want this man to commit more crimes. He wants me to come and tell the police to stop him.'"

Sydney Archbishop George Pell said he welcomed the royal commission as a chance to clear the church's name.

"Public opinion remains unconvinced that the Catholic Church has dealt adequately with sexual abuse," Cardinal Pell said in a statement.

"Ongoing and at times one-sided media coverage has deepened this uncertainty... We shall co-operate fully with the royal commission."

Chief Inspector Fox says if the church is genuine, those comments need to stop.

"It seems to be the church that has been continually screaming out the message that we don't need a royal commission... we've had enough from that," he said.

"Now we're going to start listening to the victims and start listening to their families and we're going to start doing something about the problem. The big problem is that denial, when you're not prepared to sit down and actually start to acknowledge that there's a problem and look at ways of fixing it."

Father Frank Brennan, a Jesuit priest and professor of law at the Australian Catholic University in Canberra, says he has concerns about the breadth of the royal commission and how long a thorough inquiry will take.

"The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which was restricted to 99 deaths over just a 10-year period, that took 3.5 years," he told Lateline.

"I think a commission of the breadth that the Prime Minister has announced, if it was to be anything more than broad brush, but if it were to have the particularity that we were looking for with state inquiries, I think it will take at least five years.

"My concern is simply that at a national level, a royal commission, asking the feds to come and investigate the states - particularly where it's a federal Labor government on a ropes in the lead-up to a federal election with Liberal state governments - I think there are all sorts of complications there.

"I would hope for the sake of the victims that things do not get too politically messy."

Father Brennan says he believes the real problem with the Catholic Church is an "unaccountable clericalism" that goes high up within the church.

"I think the church is a very broken institution, but one of the great things in living in a country like Australia is that we robustly pride ourselves on the rule of law and we're a pluralist democratic society where the church is not exempt from things on the basis of some spurious pleading of freedom of religion," he said.

"What's going to be shown from this royal commission isn't only churches, it's the nation as a whole, and there are going to be very political questions as to what's ruled in and what's ruled out with a national commission of this inquiry."

Prominent Opposition frontbencher Barnaby Joyce says in the interests of bipartisanship he expects the Government to consult the Coalition about the inquiry's terms of reference.

"It surprises me that this all of a sudden overnight has got momentum and is coming to some conclusion when other issues similar to this have been pursued for years and never got anywhere," he told Lateline.

Senator Joyce, a practising Catholic, supports the plan to have the inquiry conduct its investigations on a broad scale.

"I want to make sure that we also don't minimise this inquiry by having it with some sort of slant of that it's a partisan or a very specific inquiry to a specific group of people," he said.

Earlier, former Toowoomba bishop Bill Morris told 7.30 he was happy the inquiry has such a broad focus.

"I think the focus needs to be wide because if we don't have a wide focus, if the commission doesn't have a wide focus, then in a couple of years' time, this question's going to pop up in other areas and we're going to have to have another commission," he said.

"If the commission has this wide focus, then it will answer the important questions that it's asking."

He says abuse is not confined to the distant past.

"I had to deal, a couple of years ago, with abuse cases within the Toowoomba diocese, of a teacher with regards to a number of girls, within recent history," he said.

"It is still happening and it's also happening across our communities.

"There are historical questions too, but sexual abuse is still happening and we need to find out why and how we can address it."